Brussels Celebrates Its Native Sons

Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Alberto Giacometti Balthus Jeff Koons Andre Lhote Rene Magritte Giorgio de Chirico

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Top of the list is the bilingually innovative Musée Magritte Museum, celebrating the city’s famed Surrealist painter, who notably influenced artists from Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, along with untold thousands of advertising campaigns. The brand-new 27,000-square-foot space is carved from the 19th-century Hotel Altenloh next to the royal palace on the historic Place Royale and exhibits the largest collection of one of the world’s most popular artists. The staid neo-classical façade is pepped up with five animated windows showing Magrittean blue sky with fluffy white clouds drifting across in an invitation to see the avant-garde art inside.

Completed in only eight months, the museum is the result of a partnership between the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; the Magritte Foundation, headed by Charly Herscovici, a family friend and heir of the artist’s widow, Georgette Magritte; and the Franco-Belgian energy group Suez, which has renovated the interiors to be as green as a Magritte apple (a contribution valued at €6.5 million, or about $9.25 million). Solar panels are on the roof, thermal screens are on the windows, and 600 low-voltage spots illuminate the art. Another €1 million to restore the building’s façade was provided by the state’s department of buildings.

The installation of the collection, a combination of museum-owned works and extended loans from private collectors, comes as a welcome surprise. As the elevator rises from the ground floor to the third level, where the visit begins, a slim glass panel allows a piece-by-piece peek at a full-length portrait of the painter’s wife and favorite muse, Georgette, a copy of a work owned by Houston’s Menil Foundation that has been divided into framed sections. First the feet, then the legs, the torso, and finally the head appear in an example of the wit that delightfully defines the mise-en-scene by interior designer Winston Spriet.

On the landing, a large window overlooks gardens in the direction of the suburban house where Magritte lived and painted most of his masterworks. Also here, a vast photo shows the artist with his eyes closed — the best way of understanding his work, he once suggested. Then, visitors enter a dimly lit Magritte universe just as deep-sea divers might plunge into the ocean’s depths.

And what a theatrical universe it is. Set off by the deep-toned blue, green, and brown walls of the structure’s second skins — anti-white boxes within boxes — 250 remarkable paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures, archives, films, documents, and Magritte maxims, written in red above the art (and all happily identified in French, English, and Dutch), are made the unrivalled focus of attention in this poetic and magical mystery tour through his work.

The chronological and thematic odyssey is divided into three sections: "The Triumph of Surrealism," from his birth in 1898 to 1929, on level three; "Taking Flight," from 1930 to 1950, on level two, and "Mystery at Work," from 1951 to his death in 1967, on level one.

Early works like The Bathers (1921) and Woman on Horseback (1927) were experiments in abstraction and Cubism influenced by André Lhote, Fernand Leger, and Pablo Picasso. Magritte’s discovery around that time of Giorgio de Chirico’s cool metaphysical style reinforced his own belief that “the art of painting is the art of thinking” and resulted in the striking Man from the Sea (1927), with the artist right on an enigmatic surrealist track of “the mystery without which the world would not exist.” The monumental figure in the painting, a man clad in black with a faceless wooden head, was inspired by the movie arch criminal Fantômas.

Highlight follows highlight: The Secret Player (1927), the artist’s largest oil painting, depicts a Surrealist game of skittles that has sent a shiny black turtle flying in a thicket of baluster posts sprouting into trees. There are portraits of patrician blonde collector Adrienne Crowet (1940) and her daughter Anne-Marie, who became a favorite muse in The Ignorant Fairy (1956), where a candle casts a mysterious darkness on her face. The Domain of Arnheim (1962), whose mountain rises in the shape of a bird’s head and wings, was inspired by an Edgar Alan Poe story. In Black Magic (1945), sorcery turns Georgette’s head and upper body into blue sky. Magrittean motifs — bowler hats, green apples, spherical bells, blue-sky birds, and the pipe that isn’t a pipe — all take bows.

There are examples of the artist’s less successful forays into Impressionistic styles reminiscent of Renoir and van Gogh in his “Full Sunlight” period during the 1940s and his provocation of the florid art of his “Vache” period in a 1948 one man show designed to shock a chic Parisian gallery (both styles later abandoned). These are accompanied by charming Art Deco musical score covers and advertising posters that he dubbed “idiotic work,” but nonetheless were necessary to make a living. Such droll objects as painted wine bottles — eagerly snapped up by collectors — include “A Rare Old Vintage Picasso” (1944).

Magritte’s late work is characterized by innovative “repetitions.” Two examples — he did many — of the famous masterwork The Empire of Lights, one a vertical version from 1954, the other a horizontal rendering from 1961, show a lighted street lamp before a house at night, all set against a daytime sky. Along with his last signed oil canvas, The Blank Page (1967), where a full moon glows in front of floating leaves above a slumbering landscape, they are the climax to a journey through surrealist poetry.

“The museum resembles the man: bourgeois on the outside and unexpected on the inside,” confirms foundation President Herscovici, who was instrumental in bringing the 10-year dream to reality. “Magritte was an enchanter. Each time you look at his paintings you see something new.”

The second Brussels opening is actually outside the city in Louvain-La-Neuvre, a new town about 20 miles east of the Belgian capital. On the edge of an oak forest, the beguiling new Hergé Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc in white concrete, steel, and glass, floats like a ship coming into port. A long wooden footbridge leads to the entrance, reinforcing the evocation of the maritime vessels that truffle the books of the Belgian cartoonist’s most popular creation, the cub reporter Tintin and his white fox terrier Snowy, whose exotic globe-trotting comic strip adventures have sold over 200 million copies worldwide. (Steven Spielberg plans to bring a Tintin trilogy to the big screen beginning in 2011.)

While architecture recedes at the Magritte collection, here it embellishes the experience: The façade sports a scene of Tintin on a quai from the book Crab with Golden Claws, and de Portzamparc’s playful picture windows resemble comic-strip panels when viewed from the exterior. Inside, the soaring atrium is the building’s key. Enchanting pastel islands of curved walls divide the reception spaces, and visitors ascend to the permanent collection in an elevator whose tower is painted in a navy-and-white checkerboard recalling the rocket of Tintin’s lunar flights in Destination Moon. In the eight permanent exhibition rooms, arranged over three floors, the light is filtered to protect the treasury of 80 original comic-strip panels and 800 documents, photos, and objects. But there’s plenty of light on the metal walkways that link the rooms and crisscross the luminous central atrium, offering vistas through the building to the greenery outside.

Commissioned by Hergé’s widow, Fanny Rodwell, and built at a cost of about €18 million, the 38,750-square-foot structure aims to show how the comic strips were produced, their inspirations — from Erroll Flynn’s pirate movies to the Marx Brothers farces — and the intriguing research resources such as a scary Peruvian mummy viewed with 3-D glasses or Chinese lanterns that Georges Remi (Hergé was his pen name) assembled to help set the scene of the far-off countries he never traveled to himself. There is also a projection room, a restaurant, a boutique, workshops, and offices.

Hergé was both a marvelous storyteller and artist. His drawing technique — the clear line, where figures are created with outlines of equal thickness and filled in with uniform colors — was not only adopted by other comic-book stars, Asterix’s creators, for example, but also attracted modern artists. Balthus and Giacometti were avowed admirers, while Warhol recognized that “Hergé has influenced my art as much as Disney. [It has] a great political and satirical dimension.” Hergé returned the compliment. Two of Warhol’s portraits of the Belgian cartoonist hang in the museum.